Is There Hope for Valley’s Old Main Streets?

I’m always looking for signs that Los Angeles is surviving, and perhaps recovering from all the calamities that have hit us in the last couple of years.

As a resident, and a homeowner, I want to know that the place isn’t going to hell. And as a columnist, my job would be intolerably gloomy if all I wrote was bad news. I’d go back to my original career goal, sportswriting, where I’d be assured of covering winners as well as losers.

So when I heard that Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick was having a seminar on reviving the San Fernando Valley’s decaying Canoga Park and Reseda business districts, I headed out there.

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Chick is a lively woman who has represented the West Valley since she defeated her former boss, Joy Picus, in last year’s election. The fact that she challenged, and beat, Picus showed there’s a hard edge to her. She needed it during the calamity she had to face after six months on the job--the Jan. 17 earthquake.

Leaving her own wrecked home, Chick roamed the district from dawn until late at night for days, goading city, state and federal officials into helping the 3rd District’s many victims.

Canoga Park and Reseda were hit hard, especially the older business buildings that, in the days before shopping plazas and malls, were the retailing heart of the Valley. Topanga Plaza, Warner Center and the other shopping centers had just about killed the old Valley main streets. The earthquake was the final blow.

Thus resurrection, not resuscitation, was the task facing Chick and the neighborhood activists, business people, architects, planners and government officials who met Friday and Saturday on the Winnetka campus of an Armenian community school.

I didn’t realize the difficulty of the job these people were undertaking until I walked along Sherman Way in Reseda with Art Pearlman, a retail marketing specialist and a partner in the shopping center development firm of Riley/Pearlman/Mitchell. We were part of a group taking a walking tour of Reseda’s business district.

In the ‘50s, Sherman Way must have been like East 14th Street or Bancroft Avenue in San Leandro, the little city next to Oakland where I went to school. I bet they had their version of a George’s Drugstore in Reseda, and their Fergie’s drive-in. The boarded up Reseda movie theater was probably once as busy as our Del Mar.

But shopping habits changed, Pearlman pointed out as we looked across the street at a big drugstore. There aren’t enough parking places by this store’s entrance and most of the parking is in the back. That’s too far for car-bound Angelenos to walk. Some of the merchants had devised a solution, converting their back doors into main entrances opening onto the parking lot.

The storefronts, however, are boarded up and locked. This practice, along with vacant stores and trash-littered stores and parking lots, gives Sherman Way a desolate look.

Demographics and ethnic change are also big challenges to Reseda’s revival. When the Sherman Way business district was young, the shoppers were the white middle-class residents of small, newly built tract houses nearby. Today, most of the residents near Sherman Way are poorer Latinos, shopping at stores operated by a multitude of ethnic groups. And, as Pearlman noted, the biggest age group in the area is 15 to 29--younger than the age group that shops the most, the 30- to 50-year-olds. Merchants will have to sell goods the current neighbors will buy.

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For Chick there was another factor. From the standpoint of her career, the political history of her district made it a dangerous task.

Chick’s predecessor, Picus, had failed to reconcile conflicts over how to restore fading parts of the Valley. In some places, she favored development. In other areas, she fought it. Business turned on her. So did homeowners.

In staging her two-day seminar, Chick bravely put these conflicting forces in the same room, inviting the same political attacks that destroyed Picus. “The anger about change is always there,” Chick told me. “It’s best to meet it head on. So I might as well get everyone together.”

As it turned out, her guests seemed pleased to have been invited. They tossed around a number of ideas. Lively discussions continued in the sunny patio during breaks.

Next month, Chick will move the process further along with a bigger community meeting in Reseda. Out of this, hopefully, she will come up with concrete ideas, developed by merchants and residents, to bring old Reseda back to life.

These are all small steps, not headline material. But they are important to ensure the survival--and prosperity--of the Valley and the rest of L.A.